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.
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.
You can still do this, as a test I put in taco.com fully expecting it to redirect to tacobell.com or some shit, but I was completely surprised at what came up lmao
Sometimes it backfired pretty badly.
Still does now, tbf!