What I miss about the early (1996-2000) World Wide Web

[snowazalea]

• A simple HTML design that I could do based on memory, or off the top of my head, without the site being thought of as too plain or ugly
• No real names, no real-life photos of myself or the interior of my home
• The Internet was dominated by kind of counter-cultural people
• Inclusive, fanciful, random webrings featuring beautiful graphics for logos that I just joined for the heck of it, or to have another pretty image on my webrings page
• People’s galleries of collected fantasy art (Sue Dawe, Jonathan Earl Bowser, people like that) that I just pored over forever
• People’s original web graphics, like Moyra’s Web Jewels, and other amazing works
• No AI junk (until 2023, really)
• Handing out and receiving little graphical web awards just for the heck of it
• College professor personal home pages
• Blogs were for ranting, not curated, honed representations of one’s perfect self, home, whatever
• No visible "friends," followers, subscriptions, whatever
• No like or reblog buttons
• No dopamine

I feel like I'm on to something... sort of. It's like I want to de-program myself, or re-program myself, or something... How would I go about doing that? I've got to make the potatoes. I'm 10 minutes late to that.