2004 was yesterday

i was on the internet in 01992: before adsense, before monkey punchers, before geocities, before amazon, but not before dot-com, as my references to lynx and the nsf should have told you. money was a big factor but not in the way you are describing

same year for me. I have such fond memories of those few years where you could just scour through university FTPs and websites for hours, finding so much cool (and informative) stuff. It felt like getting a peek into so many worlds I knew nothing about, and it felt limitless (especially as I was a kid at the time). Indeed, the openness and "generosity" of people online in those days set such a good example for me, that I try to "pay forward" in my daily actions and work.

one way in which firefox is worse now is that ftp support got broken a few years ago

1992 was 7 years before 2004, which was 20 years before today.

>1992 was 7 years before 2004

1992 was 12 years before 2004

dyscalclia sucks

Just subtracted off one too many fives!

they were an especially eventful 12 years for the internet

I remember the weird ‘paid to surf’ things. Hilarious what wildly silly business ideas pop up when money is cheap and people are exuberant.

Was that some kind of ad revenue sharing?

Yes, check All Advantage. It was a browser addon showing you add while you were browsing. I remember receiving a check from them (adressed to my mother obviously) when I was a teen.

Well people made fun of ordering Domino's on the internet (hack the planet!). Now I have their app on my phone.

Google was, ironically, a reaction to how heavily ad-laden Altavista was.

Russ Alberry's famous rant about spam ruining USENET was 1998: https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/writing/rant.html and should be required reading for anyone trying to build a decentralized communication system.

> pre dot.com or the bbs world to find it

That was indeed where the good stuff was (and some of the bad stuff; BBS culture could be flamey and cliquey as well as welcoming). It was so good that an entire generation of people keep trying to build it over and over again, such as bluesky, mastodon, and the deceased cohost.