Asklemmy

Those obscure websites you were referring to had a high barrier to entry

Barrier for entry? I had a geocities page when I was around 11 or 12 (and it was free, geocities ran banner ads on my page. I could host something like 50mb-100mb in pictures). I learned HTML because I played a webgame called Neopets, and you could customize little webpages for your pets and your shopfront. I think it had CSS too (and it was the new thing!).

The barrier wasn't making a website, it was visibility. How many human visitors do you think my geocities page got? Pretty sure just the people in the webring I joined, and my mom. But I spent a lot of my time looking at other people's obscure geocities pages about pokemon or their doodles or whatever. Was my page very useful or interesting? No, but it was my little corner of the internet, and I was so excited to visit other people's fan pages and add them to my links list or whatever. Or figure out how they pulled off some new rad html stuff that I had to do for myself.

I had to take my geocities page down. There was a form on my site so people could send me cool facts about pokemon (it would show up in my email which my mom had access to), and someone typed up some awful pokemon sex story, so my mom made me take it down!

Anyway, I'm not sure what I was trying to say, but no, it was braindead simple and freely available to make a website. The internet was more human. Other kids at my school knew how to do it. Not sure what kids would say these days if you asked them to put their doodles on the internet. They'd upload it somewhere, where people can comment on it, upvote it, downvote it. My geocities page was entirely mine, nobody was there to judge or monetize my shitty doodles (outside of banner ads)