I'm
definitely an oldbie when it comes to the Web. I built my first website in 1995.
It's kind of hard to compare what it was like then to what it's like now. There's even a little bit of a paradox in there. It used to be the case that putting content online took some effort -- nothing too particularly difficult, but if you wanted something online you had to make a website for it, and that took time and specific skills, and often it took money. And that doesn't even begin to talk about what you had to do in order for people to be able to find it -- search engines weren't even a thing yet, and even once search engines did exist you had to make sure that enough other websites were linking to yours for them to even find you.
But the paradox is: It's so much easier now for anyone to post content online. You don't have to make a website. We have search engines that can find just about anything. And yet... almost all of the traffic on the Internet goes to a fairly small number of services.
I don't know if I really miss those early days of the web. It was more like a library -- there wasn't really much in the way of interactivity. Having a guestbook where people could sign their name and leave a comment was cutting-edge technology because web browsers had only recently added support for text fields you could type in! Web forums were a pretty obvious extension of the concept but the ones that existed back then didn't look a thing like what they look like now. (The idea of having threads instead of replies was
controversial -- many people would not have appreciated the way forums like this one have a single line of posts in a thread instead of having a branching tree of conversations.)
Sure, there was a certain kind of charm to how things were simpler then. Advertising existed but it was a one-to-one thing where you agreed to link to someone else rather than having random ads in a banner coming from an ad network.
But on the other hand, the quality wasn't necessarily
better than what we have now. The web was harder to navigate. People were just as likely then to publish factual errors than they are now, but it was harder to cross-reference information to be able to identify them.
Sites like Time Cube were not actually
unusual in terms of design and layout. (Though the actual content on that site is particularly nutty.)
I guess you could analogize the modern web to how it was back then to comparing a big city with an old-fashioned rural community.