Close, but 2000s had some very intrusive and malware ridden advertisements. Popups everywhere, aggressive banners, malware and random browser toolbars being installed to your system. Complete wild west of unrestrained advertising. Online ad blocking didn’t start with Ublock Origin, the first tipping point was in the 90s and 2000s, where famously clean and effective search engine Google swooped in to “save us” with their Chrome browser blocking popups by default, and their own concept of ‘ethical ads’, which were mostly unobtrusive and text-based (what happened there?). Which was nice for a while before Google exploited the popularity that bought them to turn into an inescapable ad monster.

People need to bring back cheesy personal websites, banners and forum signatures…

There are still some corners online where you can find and make those, even if you don’t have the money, time or knowledge to host one yourself. For example:

Neocities (yes it’s like Geocities)

I am obsessed with those sites. It’s like the internet back in the day when I was a teen. I hope the social media and content creator sludge never overcomes it…

“Normal guy in 2000”

as someone who was into computers and in high school in 2000, that that was not normal.

even if yo mean normal computer literate person, not even then… Most people did not run their own servers, was it more common, yeah, but it wasn’t a given.

Things were only free if you were into piracy, everything cost money though without as much marketing, but then it wasn’t a huge market…

Also ads were everywhere and worse…

What are you talking about, ads were far worse back in the 90s /2000. Were you even using the Internet back then? Couldn’t block them and things like infinite pop ups were rampant, if you didn’t have a firewall setup and anti virus, your entire Windows 98 setup could be wrecked in minutes just being online

Shut up old man.