The early internet was so human and genuine.

I’m part of the eternal September. It was glorious for us, but the old timers hated our ass.

Exactly this. Shit I remember when the alt.* tree was added to USENET. The amount of the cabal talk and how the argument actually was: "No, nobody wants to pay to host your racist rants". And some of the worst stuff I see on Reddit today is light-years better than what the Internet was in plain sight back in the day before cracking down on things actually came around.

I'm glad person in the imaged post was happy with the Internet back then, but it was far from "human and genuine". This is absolutely some rose tinted nostalgia. What they miss is small niche communities and this kind of talk is exactly how "get off my lawn" elderly people get started.

I first used the internet in 1992. It was nice and quiet back then. You could send emails and poke around with a text browser and gopher. Then you could think "Welp, not much to see here" and go outside or read a book.