I miss those for the specialized, focused, universal (a.k.a. single shared forum) for various specialized topics, instead of having to site-hop in order to get the full picture for any given topic now.
Too many channels
=> too much fragmentation
=> little shared experience
=> increased polarization
=> emerging conflict
=> heads knocking together everywhere !!!
I remember ICQ, so many years ago, just don’t remember my number. Then MSN came out and I hated it, but everyone went over there. All of this in the era of dial-up internet
I used to have a few Geocities pages, downloading mp3 through Kazaa, even had a MySpace profile or page or whatever, but it was so ugly that I quickly left it behind.
I remember it was actually “It really whips the llama’s ass”
I used Aim/AOL And ask Jeeves. I was pretty stupid when it came to the Internet, I thought AOL was the Internet. It took me a long time to figure out the AOL browser was just Internet Explorer with a different GUI.
I thought ask Jeeves was a pretty good search engine, better than today, you actually got information instead of advertisements. There were better search options back then too, include words, exclude words, and boolean phrases were all available options.
, oh and Z-modem for FIDO-mail
