There's an interesting modern case where a meme started on Mastodon, but then it popped up on Reddit and everyone seemed to have a different idea of which YouTuber/Twitter community/etc came up with it.
https://mastodon.social/@picklemaddierix/100639571254871391
https://old.reddit.com/r/teenagers/comments/bt9ww9/gender_is...
It might have been the first Mastodon meme to go viral on the wider internet.
I think you just described one of the "sub periods" covered in the article. That phase happened but it wasn't dominant for the whole 15 year era.
It’s not so important what was dominant as that things that weren’t dominant had so much more of a place online. Not now in the adtech monoculture.
Now I am less online, in that way. I don’t care for what became almost the only options.
I’ll take the Wild West and scam prone “web3” over any amount of the “modern web”.
In the internet’s early history, the commercial internet experience was very different and often about companies trying to make money with different rather than all powerful “big tech” platforms. And yes, of course many tried (and often failed) to commercialise it.
However, the experience of being “very online” back then was completely different and existed outside all that.
It was a world of IRC, newsgroups, independent forums, personal websites, DC++ hubs, LAN parties etc. that was nearly totally unrelated to big companies and websites. Yahoo vs Google was mostly irrelevant for people inhabiting this world, which was indeed much as Chris describes, at least from my perspective.
Although it evolved over time and was clearly under threat towards the end, this version of the internet lasted well up to the mid-late 2000s.
Summary: this post misses the point and does not paint a “more correct” narrative than Chris does in any meaningful way.