And/or human-curated web directories.

And trusted brands.

People buy brands because they don't want to figure out what's good or bad. Brands tend to gain a reputation by being good.

The same is true for websites. People will trust specific websites when they seek information, and those websites will get passed around.

I don't know how the old web worked, but something decentralized makes sense to me.

Indexing tools will always be more convenient than the alternative of having to discover links yourself.

People pick convenience above almost everything else unfortunately, a few may prefer the old world but a vast majority of people will use Google and whatever its successor is.

It was a bit annoying, you just kind of wandered around aimlessly until you stumbled upon something interesting.

Google was a breath of fresh air.

Google was powerful because it found those "something interesting" - you'd be searching for details on how to configurate and obligator and the answer would be on an entire forum dedicated to obligators that you didn't even know about - and then you'd spend time there learning and reading. You'd use Google to find interesting places and then you'd colonize them.

Now Google is used for strategic shots - you are interested in one piece of information, you find it, and you quickly retreat to your safe havens.

People used to email each links to cool websites!

And there were services like Hotline!

And bookmarks. You bookmarked everything!

Oh I remember the Internet in the mid to late 90s. I just don't remember how anything worked technologically in the 80s.

The web was invented in 1989, so mostly it didn't. Before that there were BBSes that you could dial into. From there, you could chat with other users who happened to be logged onto the same server or download text documents and whatnot that others had uploaded.

Ah. Yeah it's those BBS's I've heard of that sound kind of cool. I'm sure they mostly sucked, but the idea sounds cool.

Well, you were siloed to whatever _local_ BBSs existed and you could dial without paying a fortune for long distance calls. If you lived anywhere outside select urban centers then you were out of luck. So yeah... let's count our blessings.

There were free BBS's, AOL and Compuserve where you would dial in with your modem. I kind of miss those days to be honest.

Gotcha!

Well….

Before modems, we used to drive to peoples houses and literally swap floppy disks of software and files!

There would be meetups.

I was just a kid, but my Dad used to network with other computer owning parents and friends!

So Sneaker Net essentially.

We’d go to computer shows too!

People had a 'links' page on their page with links to pages they liked, and if you liked the page you visited you clicked on the links and bookmarked relevant ones, and then sent them to your friends and put them in your links page.