Yeah, I'd say "old web" is early '90s up through about mid-2000s or so. Geocities, Tripod, Angelfire, lots of standalone web forums, the early blogosphere, no social media, etc.

‘09-‘14 is hilariously not the “old web.” With that said, those of us who participated in what I consider the “old web” are likely “old” now, so… shrug?

Two of my favorite sites [0][1] still online—Lurkers Guide to Babylon 5 and ex-astris-scientia—were started in ‘92 and ‘98 respectively.

Elegant content for a more civilized age.

[0] http://www.midwinter.com/lurk/

[1] https://www.ex-astris-scientia.org/

I've just gotten used to this at this point. My first time on the web was somewhere around 1995 I think, although my first time on the Internet was earlier (it was a proxy through some ancient BBS and I'm pretty sure it was using gopher). Even though I was just a kid back then, clearly that makes me old now.

I’m old and it’s definitely not the old web. I consider the old web to be when PNGs were sliced with Fireworks and laid out in tables.

2009-2014 is Web 2.0, back when people still thought social media was a good idea.

+1 for this

I'd consider the facebook and mega era to be relatively new, the "old web" for me would be the one without centralization around a few giants, the era of random phpbb forums, private websites with "this site is under construction" banners and internet directories to find stuff.

My first grandchild was born in 2000. And the COBOL panic for Y2K is probably partly my fault because 4 characters were too computational expensive when I wrote code that probably still powers your Igloo ice containers and GEICO insurance policies. 80's tech still persists!

For me the old web is when people still had homepages. When those went away, the old web died.

It was still a significantly different era than today. Let’s call it Middle Web. Maybe Late Middle Web.

Right? When I think of the old web I think of my Xena and X-Files fan sites on Geocities circa 1997