Text. With pictures. You know, like books. Which you can actually use while, say, fixing something, unlike a video which you need to pause, rewind, watch again, while balancing pieces of a torn down laptop on your hands.

I'm aware there was text. And some pictures. Sometimes of pretty girls.

But the assertion I'm addressing was a golden age of online video specifically.

(I also typically prefer text to video, though good, well-produced, audience-respecting video and audio can be of value.)

Text with pictures suffer horribly from link rot when the pictures aren't on the same site (for example forum threads), with all the image hosting services that had closed in the last decade (or even dropbox stopping to serve as image host, even for paying clients)

You are absolutely correct about the timeline! My experiences with independent video sites were mostley between 2000 and 2007 I'd guess. I do not think this contradicts any of my other statements, though.

Looking back further before video, we had web-rings which allowed for finding some of the best and worst sites on a subject :) I can't be the only card carrying member of the HTML Writers Guild here, can I?

Thanks.

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