but wait there’s these spaces
Image description:
Young woman helping an old woman as she reminisces about the old web, “The web used to be open and distributed! Not closed and concentrated in the hands of a few companies!” The young woman, “Sure grandma, now let’s get you to bed.”
The web also used to be a minefield of gore/CP/snuff videos/porn links.
To the point clicking a hyperlink was a gamble between seeing what you wanted to see and seeing a child getting their heart cut out by the Mexican cartel.
Edit: Do y’all not remember the early days of the internet? After AOL but during Google’s infancy? The internet was the literal wild west. Everything was permitted and it was hard af to block shit you didn’t want to see. So if you saw a hyperlink, you had no fuckin idea what was on the other side of it. It could’ve been anything from a Rick roll to a fuckin snuff video. Not to mention the websites back then. Funnyjunk.com showed gore regularly. Live Leak was a normal viewing occurrence. You could even be scrolling on a forum site and accidentally watch the most fucked thing you’ll ever see.