1) I remember this time, we had delightfully nerdy hobbies back then. Little side projects and no one really cared how it was presented. It reminds me of my Southpark website that I maintained with each episode a summary and some screenshots. I spend quite a bit time on it, with my little counter hitting 1,000 views at some point(maybe I was half of that).
2) the web was not created for mobile. Everything is pretty awful, and not accessible. Reader view is not functional and it hinders absorbing the knowledge from these pages.
But I do feel there was a larger diversity, maybe I’m too locked in to social media and Google.