My favourite spot was a little later, early & mid 2000s. The barriers had been lowered, but publishing still required some motivation. There was a ton of content to discover, a lot of discovery channels and "information wants to be free" still felt like a prevailing wind.
I think part of the reason was, as you say, lower standards. We were being exposed to content that didn't have an outlet before that. The music was new, black, polished chrome... to borrow a Jim Morrison line.
A bigger part is discovery though. Blogrolls & link pages were a thing. One good blog usually lead you to 3 or 4 others.
These days, most content is pushed, often by recommendation engines. Social media content is dominated by quick reaction posts, encouraged by "optimization."
The medium is the message. In 98, the medium was html pages FTPed to some shoddy shared host to be read by geeks with PCs. In 2003, it was blog posts. In 2020 it's facebook & twitter.
I think part of the reason was, as you say, lower standards. We were being exposed to content that didn't have an outlet before that. The music was new, black, polished chrome... to borrow a Jim Morrison line.
A bigger part is discovery though. Blogrolls & link pages were a thing. One good blog usually lead you to 3 or 4 others.
These days, most content is pushed, often by recommendation engines. Social media content is dominated by quick reaction posts, encouraged by "optimization."
The medium is the message. In 98, the medium was html pages FTPed to some shoddy shared host to be read by geeks with PCs. In 2003, it was blog posts. In 2020 it's facebook & twitter.