My first memories were just getting the damn thing working. We had to add RAM to our Packard Bell 486 and buy a modem. Getting email working on it was a chore but that was for my parents so I did not care until Hotmail came out a few months later when I could get my own. Then I essentially signed up for spam. I read a lot of PC World and looked through Yahoo's categorized websites which were a lot of Geocity sites. I'd use WebCrawler to search for SimCity 2000 sites and since I was 12, boobs. That last one was risky because closing Netscape Navigator took a good minute to close out so there was no quick switching to something else if someone walked in. I would also hit up chat rooms and forums, generally PC or N64 related ones. Many of those probably should have had a lot more moderation than they did. I think I remember Tom's Hardware's chatroom/forum exposing me to things that a 12 year old and even adults should probably not be exposed to.

Overall, there was a lot less moderation and a lot less centralization. You had to seek out what you were looking for because there was not a ton of tracking and your interests would not be constantly bombarding you and reinforcing your views.