I think the GP is talking about long before IE6 was a thing. Even back in the IE4 days there were web based games, HTML chat rooms, etc. I remember writing vast interactive 3D landscapes in VRML which were embedded into home page even as early as the late 90s (~4 years before IE6 was released).

But aside VRML and other browser plugins the web was ostensibly just a network of hyperlinked documents. You'd make an action and get a fresh page. Make another action and get another fresh page. Sure it was primitive by today's standards but it wasn't possibly to do half the "evil" things we complain about today (user tracking, browser mining, etc) and there were still big social hubs like the Yahoo! portal too. What's more, because the barrier for entry as well as people's own expectations were that much lower it meant you saw a hell of a lot more individuality in the content posted. People would literally put a website up about their favourite designs of bridges, the shapes of snail shells, cartoon trivia no normal person should care about, or some local landmark. There were sites dedicated to the most mundane of things yet they were strangely fascinating topics because you get drawn into the topic through the obsession and wonder that drove the sites author to dedicate his on little piece of the web to it.

These days the signal to noise ratio is so far tilted the other way with people obsessing too much about contributing what they think people want read or boasting about stuff they feel is boast-worthy that it almost completely drains out the purist content from people who just post stuff that genuinely interests themselves. This is compounded by the fact that the web has been gamified by some big names to encourage the kind of boastful content I described earlier because that feedback loop of posting content then waiting for "likes" and/or means more screen time which, in turn, means more eyeballs on adverts. The fact that everything is so bite-sized hardly helps either; Facebook statuses, Twitter "tweets", Instagram posts - they're all short, direct, "shots" of information. Fewer people engage in the longer process of having a page dedicated to a subject. Which means we lose a lot of detail, creativity and personality.

The only good thing about the modern web is that while the barrier for entry writing a website has gone up, inversely the barrier for entry publishing content has gone down dramatically.