The Early Web Before Social Feeds Existed
Launch library · evergreen read
Before feeds decided what to show people, the early web was mostly a place you had to navigate yourself, page by page, often guided by nothing more than a bookmark list or a friend's recommendation. Discovery was slow, deliberate, and largely disconnected from any centralised system deciding what deserved attention on any given day.
Personal homepages were common, hand built and often idiosyncratic, reflecting a single person's interests without any algorithm smoothing them into something more broadly palatable. Finding one usually meant following a chain of links from a related site rather than being served it automatically by a system predicting your interests in advance.
That slower pace shaped a different relationship with online content. Without a feed refreshing endlessly, there was a natural stopping point built into browsing, a sense of having reached the end of what you set out to look at, rather than content simply continuing forever with no obvious place to stop and step away.