Was a lot of it classic word of mouth, email, etc.?
I imagine something like that, but I’m wondering as I feel like there may be some useful pieces of knowledge that may be worth recalling as people gradually start to move back out of the more centralized sites/services.
For me it was word of mouth. I found out about Slashdot, fark, Google, and boingboing from friends.
I literally bought a book called The Internet Yellowpages. I wish I still had it. It included great IRC, Usenet, etc servers.
Fuck. I remember that.
Word of mouth from friends, on forums, and chat rooms.
Web rings were neat. A bunch of sites would be part of the ring, and you could use the little applet at the bottom of the page to jump to the next site. An interesting way to expose yourself to a bunch of content in a similar category. Kind of wish they still existed, but I assume they’d be abused by the same SEO fuckers.
And let’s all not forget typing in random shit for domains to see what came up.
i ran a few sites that grew organically from a base of locally dialed-up-to BBS systems…back in the aol/compuserv days. some BBSs became original gateways to local internet access.
Usually it meant finding websites with similar interests and banding together. You might form a webring, or trade banners with an affiliate site, or have community-voted top 100 lists, etc.
In 2000 I had a website about the then-current animated series X-Men Evolution, and I remember getting emails from other people who ran X-Men Evolution fansites and we would link back to each other. Eventually enough X-Men Evolution websites sprung up that one of those Top 100 list pages* sprung up to rank all of us. Clicking on my banner would result in a vote for me. I don’t think I was ever the #1 page, but I remember being in the top 5-10.
*if you have no idea what I’m talking about or are too young to remember these, they were EVERYWHERE in the early 2000s for many different subjects and fandoms. I don’t really miss the era of the Top 100 lists, because they could be easily gamed just like SEO (emulation sites were notorious for this). But I spent many hours of my teenage summer vacations finding a subject matter I liked, like Pokémon, and just going down the list and exploring.
Word of mouth, webrings. Curated directories were huge.
As a youngster then, it was mostly word of mouth and random links.
Someone would have some cool site or game they’d tell everyone about. You’d see someone at the library on some site and you’d peek at the URL.
Sometimes those sites would link to other sites.
It felt endless even back then. And for all intents and purposes, it was, to the average user.
Everyone else has already covered webrings and directories, but there’s a couple things missing imo. Or maybe I just came in too late.
Back in, I want to say 2003 or so, I discovered this absolutely incredible browser extension called StumbleUpon. It was like a crowdsourced version of those contemporary curated link pages; you gave it a list of topics you were into (ranging from vague things like “art” down to really specific things like "), and when you pushed the “Stumble” button it added to your browser, it took you to a random website that matched one of your chosen categories. In turn, when you found a website that wasn’t in the database, you could add it by checking off what category/ies it fit into. I spent hours a day hitting that button and being taken to random new content, and quickly became the clever one in my friend group by finding all the best “cheezburgers” and “demotivationals” and “image macros” lol. Hell, I’d still be using it now, if they hadn’t shut down like five years back.
And let’s not forget Geocities neighbourhoods! Every GeoCities site was a “house” in a metaphorical “city” and at the bottom of their page, you could move between "house numbers’ to visit their “neighbours”. So if you found a good site, but got bored, you might check out who’s nearby. Cities were loosely themed, but didn’t enforce topics of any kind, so you might go from a Sailor Moon fansite to a college student’s tutoring homepage to a shrine to a dead loved one. You always found fascinatiing stuff eventually.
I spent so much time using StumbleUpon. It was a great way to discover random stuff
It’s called mix now
Mix is barely a shadow of StumbleUpon… The closest StumbleUpon “clone” I have found so far is cloudhiker.net. There are a few others that attempt the same thing but aren’t quite there yet. I also used StumbleUpon daily since inception until it was shut down. I really miss it.
Earlier forms of SEO: I remember when Yahoo was a directory, not a search engine. In those days the categories they accepted you into mattered A LOT for discoverability.
IIRC, that was powered by Mozilla Directory (AKA dmoz!). RIP. I was an editor for a couple categories for a while. Curated link lists looked like they might be the way to go, but search engines ended up getting really good at the time so the project kind of declined.
Word of mouth, networking, magazines, and books were big, as I recall.
Oh yeah, magazines and traditional ads like billboards with URLs on them. “www” was in everything, some even with the protocol.
Remember all those CDs tucked into magazines?
