we had facebook, but things weren't centralized to only 5 websites yet. You are right though, there's a lot about the old internet that was better, but there was also stuff that was worse. It was more untamed perhaps. I certainly don't miss rotten.com or goatse or the absolute cesspit reddit was at the time (as you mention). We tend to forget about this and just think about the good, like individual weird blogs hosted on their own quirky websites actually being able to find an audience (which still exist to some extent but not to the same degree at all). Still, I think "the internet was always shit" is too cynical of a take. Some parts of the internet were always shit. Some of it changed for the better, some for the worse.