There are even fewer of us that remember the totally text based forums and IRC that was in many ways the innocent Garden of Eden era, before Eternal September happened. I was very much a child, so I'm not really nostalgic about that era of the net, since it was far more of an echo chamber in many ways back then, but it was "safe" and "innocent" back then. You had to verify sources even more, since the majority of sources weren't available online, but the vast majority of people using it were not only fluent in at least one human language, they were also fluent in multiple programming languages, Assembly being far more popular than than it is now. This is when you could trust any link. The false actors hadn't managed to infiltrate the protected Geek Sphere, quite yet.

Then CompuServe happened, and it was no longer a refuge for us computer geeks, all of a sudden there were business people looking at our ideas. They didn't like them much at all, to say the least. AOL followed and further saturated the net with people who had no idea what they could do with it. This is when us netizens started warning to check the link address before you clicked. Back then, you could easily keep a database list of the false actor domains.

Then the late 90s and mostly 2000 happened. That's the Wild West you're talking about. All of a sudden, you HAD to have antivirus programs, you needed many programs such as adblockers that wouldn't exist for another few years, IRC and Use.net had been piracy hubs, but all of a sudden Napster and Bearshare made those archaic forums unnecessary. Metallica did their thing, accidentally creating a bunch of Metallica fans that would never buy anything by Metallica, but they had access to their entire discography. Hell discography downloads became a thing about this time. Don't download the entire discography of The Kinks. That shit contains literally 40 to 120 gigs of MP3s across 40(?) albums, depending on compression quality.

I'm a Xennial being born in 1980 and on the net as early as late 1986, early 1987, my father was in the industry and literally helped code parts of UNIX, while he was in The Navy in the early 1970s. I've been shown evidence that we were the first household in a multi-state area, thanks to the meticulous data keeping of The Baby Bell that we were part of, that had two dedicated phone lines far earlier than anyone else except my father's colleagues, all of whom lived multiple states away from us since my father has been remote working as much as he can since SSH was adopted as standard in UNIX. He rejects all technology that he can. He claims that it is all based on extremely faulty programming, and we can't trust it.

There have been several periods as the net gets bigger, and I don't doubt that we will look at right now as a "special time" in the future. I'm not sure if that will be because we finally found the limits of LLMs or if it's because the net will evolve into something that is closer to the spirit of "a place to find the truth through facts," which is what it started as.