The Old Internet was mostly populated by English-speakers who could afford Internet access and had the attention span to work through the process of getting online. The ratio of legit hackers to Septemberites was a lot higher. Corporations had only the vaguest impression of how to exploit Internet users for profit. Foreign nation-states didn't yet have gigabit pipelines pumping out propaganda and misinformation. Cyberspace hadn't been industrialized yet.

Most of the junk you had to clear out of your forum beyond the usual dick pill spam was Serdar Argic[0] bot posts, Time Cube[1] style schizoposting, or trolling from the likes of GNAA[2]. You didn't really even know what they were on about, most of the time. You never felt like you were censoring a legitimate opinion, deleting stuff like that, and anyways, nobody complained. We were there to talk about Star Wars Episode I, make "all your base" jokes, or try to get our Linux drivers working because Bill Gates was the devil.

If you got banned from a popular website, it didn't affect your life outside the Internet at all. (Nowadays, if you die on the Internet, you die in real life.)

Google had no trouble keeping spam blogs out of the page 1 results, but gave you some interesting links if you looked up "santorum". Half the Internet seemed to think 9/11 was an inside job, and there were some frothy arguments about it, but believing either way usually didn't affect the rest of your identity.

It was a wonderful and crazy place, but it was the product of a particular time. And even though I'm angry that the Internet is now just bland junk posted inside digital gated communities, I doubt lightning is going to strike twice. Look to the future, not to the past.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serdar_Argic

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Cube

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNAA