Because they were the web.

im a distortion

BRB

Almost of all of it was deep web.

back then, the dark web, was just stuff you didnt know the link for

No, the dark/deep web have always existed

Most of the fun places weren't accessible by crawlers.

becuase no one realized someone had put up the page lol

having to get the webcrawler to crawl your site

It qualifies as deep web to me if it's not public and not just indexed by search engine, you actually have to find it yourself.

I think usually to be deep web it also has to be generally inaccessible

i do remember being like 13 and the first time like 5 of us got together and one kids dad had AOL, we snuck into the AOL chatrooms late at night to just talk shit

Also, I used Altavista then.

So, an unindexed public-content site is not part of the deep web

Ask Jeeves... I remember trying to phrase things as questions as a kid

we thought we were the coolest mofos in the world those days

But e.g. every private torrent tracker is, despite having a public IP and DNS name

@TylerC Hahaha! Yeah, the shit talk in the chat rooms was funny.

People actually took it seriously.

We got this one guy really upset on this dating website.

We were pretending we were some hot chick.

@Undead Mockingbird ya at like 3am it was basically just other kids that snuck onto their parents computers

It was the first time I trolled anyone online.

YES

before anyone ever said troll

aye

and we were just assholes lol

and peopel didn't say "click" instead of navigate

TBH I think part of it is that the internet became such a serious place

i fucking hate it when the media says "just click this URL"

Or, more accurately, dominated by serious places

Click was always as in mouse click

oh ya, i see what you mean now, but ya i get that too

quake was so amazing

i still love breaking out d2

decades later, i FINALLY managed to read the source code

it's all online now

it's ... weird

SC to what?

some parts really genius, some like duct tape