Word of mouth from friends, on forums, and chat rooms.

Web rings were neat. A bunch of sites would be part of the ring, and you could use the little applet at the bottom of the page to jump to the next site. An interesting way to expose yourself to a bunch of content in a similar category. Kind of wish they still existed, but I assume they’d be abused by the same SEO fuckers.

And let’s all not forget typing in random shit for domains to see what came up.

One other person said it but I can provide a bit more context: web rings were the life blood of fan communities that weren’t on Usenet or irc. Many people would make their own website (yes, geocities and much later, angelfire … there were others but I don’t recall) and petition to link up to the webring.

Being on group email lists was a big thing too. Listserv was one but there were a bunch of others at the time. The group emails were like forums a little bit.

At least in the corners of the Internet I hung out there were a few sites that got “big” and they would often have pages that would maintain links to other sites as well as being part (or the originator) of the webring. Sometimes on the community site you could be kind of a member and get a blurb, or just your name, which would link to your email or person website (or both}.

The larger and more polished community sites really did kind of end up as these social hubs and an early form of social media.

You still used search engines to dick around but they really sucked pre-seo but they were sometimes their own community and link hubs in their own right (Yahoo).

You could also just browse larger sites manually. Exploration was part of the experience and stumbling on weird stuff randomly was one of the best things about late 90s, early 00"s internet.

Everyone else has already covered webrings and directories, but there’s a couple things missing imo. Or maybe I just came in too late.

Back in, I want to say 2003 or so, I discovered this absolutely incredible browser extension called StumbleUpon. It was like a crowdsourced version of those contemporary curated link pages; you gave it a list of topics you were into (ranging from vague things like “art” down to really specific things like "), and when you pushed the “Stumble” button it added to your browser, it took you to a random website that matched one of your chosen categories. In turn, when you found a website that wasn’t in the database, you could add it by checking off what category/ies it fit into. I spent hours a day hitting that button and being taken to random new content, and quickly became the clever one in my friend group by finding all the best “cheezburgers” and “demotivationals” and “image macros” lol. Hell, I’d still be using it now, if they hadn’t shut down like five years back.

And let’s not forget Geocities neighbourhoods! Every GeoCities site was a “house” in a metaphorical “city” and at the bottom of their page, you could move between "house numbers’ to visit their “neighbours”. So if you found a good site, but got bored, you might check out who’s nearby. Cities were loosely themed, but didn’t enforce topics of any kind, so you might go from a Sailor Moon fansite to a college student’s tutoring homepage to a shrine to a dead loved one. You always found fascinatiing stuff eventually.