In my experience, it was more atomized, which isn’t necessarily good or bad, but was certainly different. It wasn’t consumed by algorithms at that point, so in that way, probably healthier. But it could also vary quite a bit based on where you went and how it was moderated. One of the first forums I ever hung out on was very small and niche compared to what a lot of forum stuff is now, so it was much more of a “everybody knows each other” feel than I experience with most of the internet now. And the few mods had a whole infraction system and were pretty tempered about stuff, which was probably more realistic to do with a group of that scale.

Some of the problems I see with the internet now are unresolved problems of scale and capitalism being a terrible fit for doing anything meaningful about them. For example, youtube algos that demonetizing people with false positives on stuff. On the one hand, how are they supposed to moderate the site reasonably at all? With the absurd rate of content being generated. On the other hand, capitalism would sooner fire every worker and make a robot run the site than payroll lots of human moderators, so even if the problem is hard regardless, they don’t even want to engage with it meaningfully beyond slapdash solutions that make life harder for people who are doing nothing wrong. There is also the fact that the upload rate would likely be considerably lower, if the site wasn’t designed to make regular uploads the main feasible way to get views. And getting views wouldn’t be so critical if people weren’t desperate for money. So that part does come back to capitalism. Panicking on content moderation because of where ads show up is also a capitalistic thing, only caring when the advertisers get upset about their product reputation.

Or another example, a popular thread on reddit in a large sub can get hundreds or thousands of responses. Most of these responses won’t get read or engaged with by anyone. So what exactly is even the point there? For people to scream into the void? Websites like that value engagement numbers intrinsically, but aren’t structured to consider the human side of what the engagement is even supposed to be for or how it will serve human needs.