Decade 2000
I only could form memories for half the 90's, and for me, the year 2000 was just a horrible time because sometimes people have really awful lives, and that's that. Most people only focus on major media, fads, and news events for decades. That's what TPTB want people to focus on. You'll notice that websites where users recall things of the past, and have genuine, actual discussions, always get flooded with shills, who remain worthless, vapid, shitty fake users that never change, never develop new opinions, never do anything differently for years.
KF and similar "silly-person discussion fora", the Chans, Reddit, they all fell victim to this. Even LiveJournal and Tumblr back in this time. They were FULL of mentally handicapped paid shitposters, even then. It's too much to get into, but each one had the glowing sped fake user infestation to the point where even in 2005, like 1/4 of users on major social platforms were fake users. Even DeviantART. DeviantART still has bots, you can tell that there's some photo of some random person, and they crap out tons and tons of shitty """art""" and a bot uploads that and randomly "faves" ANY!!! crap in newest. Bot accounts will fave screenshots with ms paint text on it.
All that stuff has to go on their own pages. 2000s were a good time to be a ree normie get out OTI, most trolls were just bored children trying to get a rise out of stuck-up, elitist StarTrek Furry Dragonkin, but again, this being the "long september" sort of era, some hideous freaks did see an opportunity in this. There were creeps, freaks, and malware EVERYWHERE. Probably like half of all those malicious programs might have been made by elitist citizens of the Internet, for the sole purposes of wrecking normies' computers to prevent them from being normals OTI. You know how unsavory nerds are. (Good nerds are cool, though!)
Every time you hear some old nerd moan and gripe about how "normies ruined the internet", be sure to picture a fat, greasy, zitfaced fat blob who's 400lbs, pasty white, and lives in a cave full of piss jugs, booze empties, cigarette butt mattresses, horror fridges, and his pride and joy is his PC Gaming "Battle Station". And also imagine his "special" cousin who gets paid to shitpost on Reddit with two secondhand smartphones.
But that's really more like 2010 problems, although they did begin in early 2000s. They only got exponentially worse from there.
Everyone who was OTI back then, misses the old way things were. Forums everywhere. Not everything was centralized. On all the forums, you'd see half or more of the posters with links in their signatures, to their Flickrs, LiveJournals, Wordpress, DeviantART or alternatives, BlogSpot, whatever other platforms. There were many fairly large sites like SheezyArt, that are just gone now. Even at the time, Sheezy was constantly down and couldn't handle its userbase. There were even more short-lived, known-about art sites that just couldn't pay the bills. So many Youtube alternatives failed similarly. Couldn't pay the bills.
That could have been prevented if like some websites, like uhh... Well there were some specialized, "snobbish in the correct and understandable way" sites where you had to ensure your stuff was presented in the best way that it could be, and be compressed. They absolutely had software requirements for users to use to export refined files. They had a reason for that. It used to be standard to upload downsized and compressed files for web use specifically, because at the time a lot of people still used dial-up. When the giant megalith sites began appearing, it'd only be a nice little courtesy if they allowed people to have a "slow connection" option. Many major sites didn't offer that! Again, poor people, or people with less access to "standard" things, get the finger all the time. For as long as money's been a thing, people without much of it get kicked around and treated poorly.
Another thing that people (especially middle-aged whistleblower types) noticed and spoke about, was the ever-shrinking American attention span. Probably was exactly the same for other countries, but I'm a USA citizen, so that's what I talk about. First people were speaking out about the effects of watching a flickering glowbox that emitted frequencies at a certain range, that supposedly put people into a dreamlike or trance state (might make a page, but it'd be short and unclear...), and that rhetoric never changed. Even mass media producers, which includes not only film makers, radio musicians, but also book series authors and comic book artists - had to admit that too much TV did alter a person's mind, at least in the short term. And that the way cultures were beginning to do more than adapt to the presence of TV, but change their own culture to worship mass media from America, was a problem. There was a LOT of commentary on this, for decades.
Home microcomputers becoming available to the upper-middle class in select areas, was just a continuation of the "TV exposure has adverse effects" stuff. Especially when there was a massive PC gaming market boom in late 90s-mid 2000s. I saw, on store shelves, games for infants. INFANTS. So I guess that means this "give your infant a $1,100 smartphone to shut him up at the store" thing kinda goes way way back... I can't look up pricing and monetary inflation about 90s-2005 PC prices and stuff like that, right now. But I'd imagine the worst thing a baby could do at a PC is puke on the keyboard and drop the mouse. Also at a store in like 2017ish, I saw an 8mo infant playing some smartphone racing car game, and it was very interesting that he couldn't even speak, yet his thumb... The way he used his thumb, it was like watching a teenager work on something. He was being really thoughtful, careful, and absorbed. He had a really coordinated and timed thumb...
I remember in elementary school, when Neopets was popular, and before Viacom bought it. I learned about it through my classmates (also, I wondered why some "girls" were oddly lanky and antagonistic for no reason, and had tiny cuts in their eyebrows. At later schools, more of the same. Right down to the eyebrow cuts and horizontal throat scars.) - Neopets was kinda fun, because you got one HTML page per pet. However, if you wanted to host an original image, you better be okay with big hideous nasty watermarks. I remember some websites that would allow you to upload images... then watch it get crunched and see text cover it. Photobucket was a real blessing later on, but today Photobucket got thrown into the deep pit of suck and shame.
There were again, many many forums, the admin of several would be 14 years old, and oddly yet unsurprisingly, considerably more mature than today's 14yo. Because time was waaay slower, literally for real, back then. Exactly the same way 1 USD had more value the farther and farther back you go. Today's time units are really shortened, but that's a completely different topic. Although a relevant one, because time constraints only got worse when the days are literally under half the duration they used to be. Quickening of Days, Timey Wimey, not linear or constant.