I miss the early days of the internet (and especially YouTube) so fucking much. I'm 28 now, and I've been online since 2009. I think 2009-2014 was the GOLDEN AGE of the internet for me, especially on YouTube.
But then again, I kinda suspect there's some deeper truth going on where your mentioned golden age might be one of the last though?
But sometimes I think the only reason (or the main reason) is that I was a teenager. It isn't about internet, it is about the user and how they saw the worldwide at that time...
Also, I remember how many different frameworks and "rich internet application" technologies existed back then (Adobe Flash, Microsoft Silverlight, Apple QuickTime, etc.). In many ways, the internet was a much more diverse and a much more 'unpredictable' place back then.
I remember the first banner ad!
Wikipedia didn't exist. It was possible to run out of websites to visit. People were, in general, super friendly, aside from the trolls on AIM trying to crash other people's clients. (IRC was a separate place though, I mostly spent time on websites.)
Forums had horrible UIs, the latency was awful. Compared to dial up BBSs that came before the user experience was much worse.
Everything was authentic. People just doing stuff, posting about what they loved. Uploading art they made and photos they took. The barrier to entry was high (you needed to own a scanner and be able to figure out how to set it up!), but not so high that determined non-technical users couldn't muddle through and still make great things.
I also wrote about my experiences and why I consider this time the golden age in a blog post here: <https://susam.net/web-golden.html>.
The original eternal September[1] predates my entry to the internet by a couple of years, but the cycle repeats eternally.
The 'mainstream media' was never taken seriously by people savvy in the early tech spaces, so the loss of it didn't really hit us as particularly impactful. But that loss made it so that the 'mainstream' no longer had any 'ground truth' they could all fall back on that would be the arbiter of correct and incorrect information, and so truth became whatever felt most right to a person at the time.
This of course has more to do with the people and culture you most identify with, rather than any kind of objective comparison of data, so groups looked more inwards and became ossified in dogma and refused to look at any other perspective in good faith. And here we are.
Having followers is the best way to get followers, which creates a fame snowball.
The result is that a few uploads get a bunch of attention, and most uploads get very little attention. The typical user feels lonely, isolated, neglected. Jealously means the attention-rich users, the ones with lots of followers, become targets for bullies -- and that leaves them miserable too. No one is happy.
Platforms with a more equal distribution of attention, such as IRC, didn't have these problems.
Virality was a mistake.
It's a Geocities archive containing websites hosted on the platform from the 90s/00s. I really like the creativity and authenticity in the archived sites, it's like looking at a mirror into the past.
Pretty crude by today's standards, but also a lot more genuine and less risky. At that time there were a lot of people on the internet like me, college kids discovering it for the first time.